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LinuxWorld: The Cornucopia of the Commons

"In 1968, Garret Hardin wrote a seminal paper that ran in
Science Magazine called 'The Tragedy of the Commons.' Hardin
defined the commons as a place where multiple people are each
endowed with the privilege to use a given resource, and no one has
the right to exclude another. Think of a pasture where many farmers
can graze their animals. When multiple users have such privileges
of use, each user benefits directly from using the resource (one
more cow in a farmer's herd benefits that farmer directly) but the
cost of each person's use is borne by all users (the increased use
that one cow puts on the pasture affects all users of the
pasture).

"The result is that each user has an incentive to use the common
resource more, and less incentive to curb their use of the
resource. The resource is thus prone to overuse and, over time, it
degrades--a tragedy of the commons. The idea of a 'tragedy of the
commons' can be applied to a wide variety of issues including
things like air and water pollution, individual consumption
choices, and--Hardin's main target--population growth..."